


P'heer Week Drabbles

by RhazadeWaterbender



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Evil Flagship, F/M, P'heer Week, how actually dare you adorable evil fucks, villains out shopping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-02-28 18:56:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2743490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RhazadeWaterbender/pseuds/RhazadeWaterbender
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a selection of my half-assed P'heer Week drabbles.   I tried.  May contain death and violent imagery.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Day 1 - Warmth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zaheer was sitting in P'Li's lap in the snowmobile scene.  This is not up for debate.

The vehicle’s cab is heated, but the sniper is still shivering even through her layers of tattered clothing. But she’s out of that crevasse and well away from it now, and she’s sitting right next to the strategist. His hair has gone completely salt-and-pepper—there'd only been a few gray strands before; has it really been so long?—and his face is haggard, but it’s _him_.

She draws him close, pulling him into her lap—they’ve done this many a time before, the incongruity of how she towers over his moderate height not lost on them—as she hugs him. Because after thirteen years’ worth of expending nearly every last scrap of qi just to keep herself from freezing, she’s hardly sure she even has any body heat left. And _he’s warm_ , dammit.

For now, the mission can wait: As soon as they’ve gotten to safety, she’s going to make a campfire. And cuddle him next to it. For _hours_.

In the driver’s seat, their friend grumbles.

“Hey,” says the sniper without rancor. “ _You_ try spending thirteen years in an ice pit!”


	2. Day 2 - Anger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> P'Li even kind of scares Zaheer. An attempt to skewer a cliché on the prow of an evil flagship.

Being magnificent in one’s fury, he knows, is a cliché—and one that he’d never quite comprehended before.

But when she’d emerged from the crevasse alongside their water-limbed friend, his first impression—even as she’d stunned the dragon—was that she’d just looked so disheveled and worn and _vulnerable_.  Moments later, that damned _chieftain_ —the word rings like an imprecation in his mind—had had him on the ropes.

And he’d seen her wheel.  Seen her draw herself up, any last vestige of fragility vanishing.  Seen her face twist into a mask of rage before she’d blasted his foe away from him.

Even in rags and broken chains, she’s magnificent in her fury.  He’s thankful that it’s on his _behalf_.


	3. Day 3 - Height Difference

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They're actually not a couple yet in this one. I should probably warn for mention of the unnamed warlord being manipulative and awful.

She’s even taller, now, than the rawboned adolescent she’d been. But where once she’d slouched—as if apologizing for her remarkable height—she now carries herself almost arrogantly, as if daring anyone to say anything in the same vein as the warlord’s taunts. ( _Don’t you_ ever _loom over me like that unless you’re_ aiming _, you great awkward oversized thing!_ )

Nonetheless, around the strategist, she still feels oversized and awkward. While she knows it’s the product of her silly, persistent crush on him—which she privately curses for refusing to fade—it irks her nonetheless.


	4. Day 4 - Seduction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It just kind of makes sense to me that P'Li would make the first move, but would have no real idea of how to flirt.

The sniper isn’t quite sure if she’s really _that_ painfully inept at flirting, or if she’s entirely misconstrued what she’d thought were signs of reciprocation from him.  But regardless of the _why_ of it, the strategist still seems oblivious to her tentative advances.

Despite worry about how long it’ll take her to be able to look him in the eye again if she _has_ misconstrued, she surreptitiously asks around for where she can acquire a crimson silk dressing gown, several scorpion-beeswax pillar candles, and a box of fire lily incense.  Much as she doubts that trashy radio dramas are the best resource, she’ll at least have made her own intent clear.

The gown, she suspects, isn’t pure silk; moreover, it scarcely reaches her knees.  The candles are shorter, by varying degrees, than they were when they were molded.  The incense is by far the highlight of her plan; she hopes against all hope that nothing disastrous—such as, say, the strategist being violently allergic to fire lilies—happens.

It doesn’t.  And as it turns out, she hasn’t misconstrued at all.


	5. Day 5 - Death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Basically, this is shameless revenge-fic in which I put Zaheer in the Fog of Lost Souls.  (This isn't even the first time I've done that, either.)

He’s beginning to lose track of time. Does he even still _have_ a physical body to which to return? He’s not certain any longer.

No matter which way he turns, there she is—denouncing him and falling into ash. Sometimes, she’s in tears. Sometimes, instead of berating him, she begs him to save her.

He should have been able to inure himself to it by now; after all, it can’t be real. But not even emptying his mind of the thought of anything but flight—as he had when she’d died, before grief could overcome him—helps.

It’s not as if he can fly in astral form anyway. He’s trapped in the mists—more so than he could be in any cell, and perhaps irrevocably—with the sniper’s death haunting him.


	6. Day 6 - Secret

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You can [blame this one on the Dirty Avatar Confessions blog on Tumblr](http://dirtyavatarconfessions.tumblr.com/post/91995924529/confession-1004). Rated T for potential tocophobia trigger, violent imagery, and vague insinuations of anarchists having sex.

The summer before her friends come to rescue her, it occurs to her that she’s been imprisoned for twelve years and the better part of a thirteenth.  With no real way of keeping track of time, exact dates are beginning to blur; still, certain specific events are branded into her memory.

When they finally come for her, she’s too caught up in joy at being free again—and at her reunion with him—to tell him.  She wonders if the pale striae that have marked her torso now for the past twelve years are so faint as to only be visible to her keen sniper’s eye, or if he’s simply too polite to say anything.

Later—as their friend helps him shave his head and face to reconnoiter—she considers telling him, just in case he’s caught again.  But she bites down on that; his being caught doesn’t bear _thinking_ about.

He’s discovered, but manages to slip his pursuers.  She’s too relieved and too angry all at once to tell him.

When they escape the capital, and as he’s seeking out their target, there’s no time.  Everything’s just become too hectic for her to risk distracting him with that knowledge.

During the battle in the domed city, she’s struck in the face by a rock.   By the time she rallies, they're already beaten, with no option left but to retreat.  Later, well away from the city, his face is grim even as he kisses her bruised forehead.

He knows, and she knows, that they may not prevail.   No sense in telling him until they’ve won.

When the target is acquired again, she sends their two friends to find her.   For one, they’re younger and itching for action; for another, it gives her an opportunity.   And for all that she knows that he likely won’t really hear her in his trance, she whispers her secret— _their_ secret—in his battered ear as he meditates.

He doesn’t hear her.

Days later—a tyrant toppled and hostages secured—they embrace in the commandeered monastery.   Even with their victory still not assured, she nearly tells him then and there.

She reminisces, instead, about the day decades ago when they’d first met—he, a new initiate to the society; she... _artillery_.

Even artillery can love— _that_ much she can tell him without reservation.   The secret, she hopes, can wait.

Her hope is to be in vain:  Their contingency plan foiled, she holds off the opposition at the top of the peak.  There—she has one of the two remaining genuine threats cornered.   But for a brief moment, she forgets the other.

That moment dooms her:   Just as she fires, her world goes dark, then incandescent, then dark again.   Her last thought, incongruously, is that she’d never gotten to tell him.


	7. Day 7 - Spirit World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And sometimes, I deliberately mix up who survives and who doesn't.  Heavily inspired by a certain scene in "Beyond the Wilds."

Until it became dangerous, the woman who now calls herself Natsumi had spent her share of time hiding out in the spirit wilds.  Spirits, after all, never pry into the matter of her great height or of the kerchief that she wears pulled down to her eyebrows.

But they do, somewhat to her surprise, _gossip_.

If only their gossip would answer the question that nags at her.  The injuries she sustained from surviving her own most devastating attack at close range—a scarred face, eyesight that seems infinitesimally less keen, and an ājňā chakra that’s apparently closed up like a fist—seem a fair enough trade for her life.  The loss of her lover that same day... _isn’t_.

But when that silly, arrogant, overpowered girl—the subject of the initial plan and the downfall of the one that had replaced it—comes to confront her, a brief moment of panic quickly gives way to indignation.

To the younger woman’s credit, she doesn’t scare easily, even when she finds herself in over her head.  She rallies, and she rails.  And then, somehow, “Natsumi” is faced with her erstwhile foe _spilling_ to her—and _not_ all of it is what she’s already overheard hiding out in the vines.

 _Would that_ I _were so haunted_ , she thinks cynically.  But she doesn’t voice that out loud.  Instead, she offers a trade:  If the girl agrees to allow the sniper to remain dead and “Natsumi” to live undisturbed, she’ll attempt to talk her through whatever is thwarting her.

They’re safe enough where they are.  She settles into a position to match the girl’s, uncertain as to whether or not this will work at all.

She opens her eyes—or so she thinks at first—to vibrancy beyond anything she’s seen before.  It’s just as he’d always described it—a realm she’d never before imagined could be _hers_ to explore as it had been his.  And somehow, as if on a breeze from a distance, she hears a familiar voice whisper a name that she hasn’t used in three years.

She’s certain of it: in his last moments, he’d managed to detach himself and retreat here.  And in some twist of irony, the girl they’d tried to destroy has given them back to one another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, maybe this one seems like a bit of a stretch even for an AU.  But it seemed to me like two things would be the case:  First, there's no _way_ someone with her [light chakra](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajna) wide open and vulnerable like that—until the battle at Laghima's Peak, anyhow—would have been entirely spiritually inept.  However, I doubt finding out as much of her own accord would _occur_ to P'Li, who spent her entire life as artillery.


End file.
